[Vision2020] The Secret Weapon: All of Us

[Art Deco]

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August 28, 2012
The Secret Weapon: All of Us By NICHOLAS D.
KRISTOF<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/nicholasdkristof/index.html>

The Republican National Convention opened by smacking President Obama with
the theme “We Built it.”

To pound that message, Republicans turned to a Delaware businesswoman, Sher
Valenzuela, who is also a candidate for lieutenant governor. Valenzuela and
her husband built an
upholstery<http://www.nationalsmallbusinessweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2012year/Program2012_websize.pdf#page=13>business
that now employs dozens of workers.

Valenzuela presumably was picked to speak so that she could thunder at
Obama for disdaining capitalism.

Oops. It turns out that Valenzuela relied not only on her entrepreneurial
skills but also on — yes, government help. Media Matters for
America<http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/08/23/how-she-built-it-foxs-rnc-theme-undercut-by-key/189537>,
a liberal watchdog group, documented $2 million in loans from the Small
Business Administration for Valenzuela’s company, plus $15 million in
government contracts (mostly noncompetitive ones).

In a presentation earlier this
year<http://www.wwb.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/WWB.5.14.ppt>,
Valenzuela described government assistance as an entrepreneur’s “biggest
‘secret weapon.’ ”

Someone has set up a parody Web site<http://www.firststatemanufacturing.com/>,
using the name of Valenzuela’s company, First State Manufacturing, to mock
the Republican message. The site, FirstStateManufacturing.com, declares,
“Thank God government was there for me.”

In short, the Republicans are inadvertently underscoring the point that
President Obama was expressing in his “you didn’t build
that<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=192oEC5TX_Q>”
comment in July. Obama noted then that “if you’ve been successful, you
didn’t get there on your own.” He pointed to public investments in roads
and bridges that enable businesses to flourish, and then he inelegantly
added, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”

Fox News erupted in outrage, selectively editing the
clip<http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/07/16/fox-amp-friends-deceptively-edits-obamas-commen/187146>to
confirm Republican prejudices that Obama doesn’t understand the
private
sector. This fits into the Republican narrative that business executives
are heroic job creators when they aren’t held back by regulations and taxes
imposed by quasi-socialist Muslims born in Kenya.

Democrats tried to highlight a flaw in that narrative when they released a
new ad pointing to Mitt Romney’s outsourcing of
jobs<http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/08/dnc-fires-back-with-you-didnt-built-that-you-destroyed-133458.html>and
telling him, “You didn’t build that — you destroyed it.”

Yet to me, that Democratic line of attack on Romney as a serial job
destroyer feels unfair. Sometimes the way to save a company is to cut labor
costs or outsource jobs, and almost nobody wants to ban trade or overseas
production even though they can cost jobs.

What is fair is to observe that the Republicans’ claim that they are the
great job creators is a fiction.

Prof. Robert S. McElvaine of Millsaps College examined employment
data<http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/has-obama-made-the-job-situation-worse/?src=me&ref=general>for
the 64 years from the beginning of Harry Truman’s presidency to the
end
of George W. Bush’s. He found that an average of two million jobs were
created per year when a Democrat was president, compared with one million
annually when a Republican was president.

More pointedly, and unfortunately for Romney, business executives have only
a mediocre record when transferring their skills to government. In the last
great economic mess, this country was led by a Republican who had been
stunningly successful in business: Herbert Hoover. Hmm. More recently,
President George W. Bush staffed his cabinet with C.E.O.’s who had been
stellar in the private sector — and that didn’t work out so well, either.

Obama’s point about our shared undertaking was made last year, more
eloquently, by Elizabeth Warren <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOyDR2b71ag>,
the Massachusetts Democrat running for Senate:

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody!” she
said. “You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear:
You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you
hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you all were safe in your
factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid
for. ...

“You built a factory, and it turned into something terrific or a great
idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social
contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who
comes along.”

In short, taxes don’t just smother. They can also fuel growth — when
they’re invested in highways or the Internet, in colleges or early
childhood education. They can create opportunities, as they did for Sher
Valenzuela.

Or for Romney himself. He built his Bain empire partly because he was smart
and hard-working, but also because of a great education and because of tax
breaks for debt financing. <http://www.economist.com/node/21543545> Tax
loopholes helped him build his fortune, and other loopholes gave him the
low tax rates to retain it.

If the Republican convention wishes to highlight and explain Romney’s
success, it should have a moment of silence to honor our infernal tax code.

Who built this country? Entrepreneurs, yes. But so did schoolteachers and
railway construction workers. Doctors and truckers. Scientists and
soldiers. You didn’t build it, Mitt Romney — we all built it.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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